Posted on 11/28/2004 7:13:51 AM PST by SJackson
WHEN Beate Niemann went in search of her father she hoped to find a man she could be proud of, but instead uncovered a truth that lay hidden for nearly six decades under family lies and deceit.
While she went looking for Bruno Sattler, a father, First World War soldier, Berlin policeman and family man, she found only SS Major Bruno Sattler: mass murderer with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Jews on his hands.
At a time when Germans have begun to embrace victimhood about the Second World War, projecting themselves as having suffered equally under RAF bombs, from Red Army rapes and under their Nazi masters on a scale that somehow equates with the millions upon whom Germany inflicted its savagery, Niemann’s story shatters this cosy attempt to retreat into shared pain.
Now Jewish groups and schools are being given special showings of an extraordinary film which chronicles Niemann’s journey in search of her father. Her disturbing voyage into the past is told in The Good Father which has won documentary prizes in the US and Canada.
It is showing in select cinemas in Germany and being screened to schoolchildren and Jewish groups. The film is a journey that many of Niemann’s generation found too painful to take.
She said: "I went in search of father I never knew and I hoped that the nagging doubts I had had about him down the years would be dispelled and I would find a man that I could be truly proud of.
"Instead I found a man who was a mass murderer, whose life was glossed over by my mother; my mother who lied to me and who continued to lie up until the day she died. I found a man who, when I was being suckled on my mother’s breast, was ordering mobile gas wagons each day to a concentration camp outside of Belgrade to kill women and children.
"I found a man who gave the orders for tens of thousands of Jews to be shot in Smolensk and outside Moscow and who participated in the destruction of 500,000 partisans, Jews, gypsies and others in Yugoslavia.
"This is what I found. This is the truth. It is inescapable. And in my greatest rage I wonder why, why he didn’t even have the decency to kill himself, to do that small thing for me?"
Broke and desperate to avoid being one of the millions on the human scrapheap of the German great depression after World War One, Sattler took a job selling jewellery in the Wertheim department store in Berlin in the 1930s. The store owned by the Jewish Wertheim family.
Then he left, joined the Nazi party, became a policeman and took the fast track to promotion with the Gestapo. Then he went into the SS security service, the SD, and then into the ranks of the Einsatzgruppen, the Action Squads which killed 1.5 million civilians in the Soviet Union before the human abattoirs of Auschwitz and Treblinka came on-stream in Poland.
In 1997, 17 years after her mother died, Niemann, now 62, went in search of the truth in 100 different archives in three countries.
But it was in her mother’s possessions and in the local planning office in Berlin that she first began to piece together the fading paper mosaic that would illustrate the moral collapse of her parents.
She discovered that in 1942, before she was born, her father negotiated to buy the spacious family house in Dahlem from a Jewess named Gertrud Leon for the knock-down price of 14,617 Reichsmarks. Sattler was able to strong-arm the property from her by offering her protection from the transports that shunted Jews eastward to their deaths every day.
He did nothing of the sort: two weeks later she was shipped to the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia and then taken to Auschwitz for gassing.
By the time one defenceless Jewish lady was shipped to her doom, Sattler’s Einsatzgruppen B had blooded themselves in the fields around Minsk, Moscow, Smolensk and numerous other places where individuals were dispatched in ones and twos and then in their hundreds and their thousands.
The film shows Niemann travelling to Belgrade where she met Liliane Djorjevic, a Jewish woman whose father was murdered by Sattler. She was incarcerated in a concentration camp that Sattler oversaw and where he ordered mobile gas vans to dispatch more than 8,000 women and children to their doom.
Tears are never far away but they do not flow from Niemann’s eyes, not even when she walks into the killing fields where her father oversaw the execution of more than 500,000 Jews and hostages, 100 of whom died for every German soldier who was killed.
Russian agents kidnapped Sattler from the streets of Berlin in 1947 and he vanished into the East German prison gulag.
Niemann’s journey of painful discovery ended in the cellar of a Stasi jail in Leipzig, long abandoned, the tiny cells where men slept 20 at a time on wooden pallets. On October 10 1972 Sattler was killed with a shot in the head in the execution cell in the jail’s cellars, a lightless, airless place the inmates called the U-Boat.
"My sympathies are solely for his victims," Niemann said. "I came away from this project only wishing I had not been born a German and that I did not have parents such as these. It is my experience that Germans of this generation are all liars."
Won't ever happen. The only reason the lawyers are picking the bones of Nazi's and their loot is because America conquered them making it safe for the lawyers. As we didn't conquer the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, North Korea, and all the other Maxrxist dictators the lawyers won't touch them.
For the same reason, don't expect any payouts from the Saudi financiers of 9-11.
Your statement just proved that you didn't take your medicine.
BTW Why so many of these JEWS want to be Poles ?
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1408519,00.html
In case you did not know: I AM GERMAN!
And I went to school in Germany, I tell you, we know a whole lot of things that happened in the Nazi era.
Grzegorz, you cannot deny the truth, that Germans are portrayed as evil - it even happened this year during the coverage of Steinbachs ridiculous claims.
And it were certainly not 98% of the 2 million that starved to death or that died of the cold, you know that and I know that.
Again and again, we don´t balance or generalize guilt, we individualize it and say that many individuals became guilty of serious crimes. The most who bear guilt are Germans, but it is part of honesty and truth to acknowledge that even Germans were victims.
My post is not plain wrong. I have relatives who live in Germany. I also speak German fluently..........My cousins and other extended family members have attended or are attending school in Germany and they have told me that WWII is not in their curriculum. So you with your rantings and ravings have shown just how educated you are...and as my relatives would say "Du hast doch nicht mehr alle Tassen im Schrank".
Since you are new here, Ginifer, you may not know that Michael IS a German living in Germany.
Could this be a generational phenomenon?
Let's face it. The current generation of American youth is terribly ignorant about American history. As the article notes, more than half of a group of American high school students believed that, at the final battle of the American Revolutrionary War, the British surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant and 6% believed that the British surrendered to Douglas MacArthur.
Is history being taught as poorly now in Germany as it is in the U.S. school system? Were things different when Michael went to high school?
The guilt topic has become relevant because other nations, in particular the Brits, don´t accept that Germans were among the victims.
"As a nation we accepted responsibility for our actions, paid our debts, and learned from our mistakes" "That was a long time ago, I personally didn't do it, and we were slighted, too"
I mean both. W Germany has paid the debt and there is at some point an end.
It was the Germans who instigated World War II, and it was Germany that was the architect of the Holocaust. Running away from it, or denying that it ever happened, or attempting to dignify it by saying that other bad stuff happened as well just won't cut it.
Sorry, but it was in particular NAZIS who committed theses crimes in the German name. The German opposition, the resistance -even at the beginning of the war within the military- were certainly victims of the Nazis as well as the misguided children and those who couldn´t vote. Anyway, the main reason for Hitlers rise can be seen in the treaty of Versailles. Nobody in Germany (except the Neo-Nazis) is running away from historic truth. What we say is, that the suffering of the German people under the Nazis, during and after the war must not be ignored, just as the suffering of all others must not be forgotten either. We are not promoting balancing of guilt or as you called it "dignifying". We just don´t ignore that lots of Germans were murdered by Nazis and the Reds, too.
I´m out of HS nearly 5 years. History is poorly taught, BUT, WW2 and its reasons is THE MAJOR TOPIC for history lessons in the classes 10 and 12 (or 13).
Yes, I do realize he lives in Germany. That's why I wrote a comment to him in German, so he would have no reason to doubt that I didn't know his nationality.
I have many family/friends (German) who have attended school in Germany who also have told me that the subject it barely touched upon.
If you read his other comments to other people you will see that he is ill informed of a lot of different aspects to WWII.
I also don't appreciate being called a liar and told to p@@s off...shows lack of respect for others with opposing viewpoints.
Jeez, you guys...
Either shake hands and come out fighting or kiss and make up: WWII is HISTORY, literally and technically.
The Germans, under Hitler's orders, invaded Poland and occupied it, thereby making Poland's citizens subject to German Law, which included conscription into the German army.
Which has nothing to do with today. Both countries are stuggling for better lives for their people.
In James Michener's saga "Iberia" there was a comment made by one wizened old Senora: There are no Catholics in Germany. What she meant was that there were Catholics in Germany, but they were not as devout as those in Spain.
And while I was in Germany, I found that "there are no Nazis in Germany". It's not that there were none...it's just that the Nazis found it prudent to not advertize themselves. Sixty years after the WWII was over, most of the "Nazis" have died.
They left lessons for the world that should not be repeated. Ever. In any country in the world. What is happening now in the Middle East is just as terrible, but those who have committed the worst crimes are just as deep in denial as their counterparts were in WWII.
Thanks for the correction.
I'm not going to kiss Herr Michael, but only because I prefer women :)
I really don't have any problems with Germans.
And I don´t have problems with Poles. I have never viewed this discussion as personal.
It seems that they killed more Christians in their own country throughout their reign than they did nazis during WWII.
I thought I smelled your hate in here.
So what, in America they don't teach the horrors of WWII either. There was an article on FR an year or so ago about a textbook that had three chapters on our internment of Japanese, versus a few sentences on Hilter.
Thank you for posting that article! I am honored to be an American of Polish descent!
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